My Love Hate Relationship With Healthcare

What if the biggest gains in health aren’t hiding in a lab result, but in the patterns you repeat every day? 

We open season three by tackling a paradox: modern medicine has never been more precise, yet chronic disease continues to rise because we treat parts while people live as integrated systems. After 20 years in practice, I share why I’m both grateful for specialization and frustrated by how often it blinds us to prevention, and how lifestyle medicine brings the wider view back into focus.

We break down the six pillars, nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, social connection, and reducing harmful exposures, and show how each one ripples across the whole body. 

Poor sleep tilts hunger hormones, drives cravings, stresses the immune system, and dulls insulin sensitivity. Movement recalibrates appetite, deepens sleep, improves resilience, and remodels the gut microbiome. Whole, fiber-rich foods dampen inflammation and support metabolic health, while sustainable stress skills steady mood and hormones. None of these levers act alone; they work best together, shaping the terrain where health or disease takes root.

Specialization still saves lives, and we celebrate that. But precision without context can miss the upstream forces that create heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and many cancers linked to daily choices. That’s why I’m launching a Lifestyle Medicine Clinic and residency training, joining hundreds of programs embedding prevention into every specialty, from internal medicine to psychiatry. The goal is simple: pair the microscope with a map, so patients and clinicians can see patterns early and change course.

You’ll leave with practical steps to protect sleep like a priority, move in ways you enjoy enough to repeat, build plates around colorful plants, set boundaries that lower stress load, and invest in real connection. Perfection isn’t required; patterns matter most. If you’re ready to think in systems, not symptoms, and to make small choices that compound into lasting health, this one’s for you. 

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Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules 

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Yo, plant-based buddies, welcome back to season three of the podcast. This year's gonna be amazing. We'll be talking about all of the different pillars of lifestyle medicine from nutrition to exercise to stress to sleep and everything in between. Yo, plant-based buddies, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about my love-a-hate relationship with the medical system. I've been a doctor now for 20 years, and I love my job. I feel validated, I feel important, I help people get their lives back. Sometimes I deliver bad news, but I feel well equipped with tools to manage that stress and trauma. 99% of the time I love being a doctor, but sometimes I just step back, zoom out, and I feel a weird tension when it comes to my profession. Now, in one hand, I'm in complete awe of how far medical science has come. The depth of knowledge we now have is insane to me. We understand biochemical pathways at a microscopic level that would have felt impossible decades ago. And we can zoom in now on single proteins and enzymes and receptors and cellular interactions with insane precision. Yet, paradoxically, I sometimes feel like we're kind of drifting further away from actually understanding how the body really works. Not because the science is wrong, but because our frame is too narrow. The human body doesn't function as a collection of isolated parts. When we go into medical training, now I completed my medical school in 2005. When I went into medical training, it was subdivided or siloed into different systems. We had the phase of cardiology, and then we had our pulmonology, and then our gastroenterology, endocrinology, gynecology, urology, all these systems, they're isolated from one and the other. But in real life, it's never like that. Every single organ and system and every cell in our body actually exists within a living communicating network. Now, when we forget that, we're missing the most important drivers of health and chronic disease. Almost 80% of visits at the primary care physician's office comes from managing chronic disease. And the same percentage, anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of healthcare spending goes to managing these chronic medical conditions that are either directly or indirectly linked to lifestyle, linked to the choices we make every day, linked to the six pillars of health, to the toxins we're we're exposed to in a single day, the foods we eat, the amount of movement in our days, how we sleep, how we connect, how we manage stress, whether we smoke or not. Now, it's one of my biggest frustrations with how badly the modern healthcare system is now siloed. Each organ gets its own specialty, and each specialty speaks its own language, and each system is treated almost like it lives in isolation. Now, I want to be clear, specialization of medical knowledge has brought insane progress, and people are alive today because of it. And precision saves lives. I cannot be a family doctor that knows absolutely everything. And how I present it to patients is that, hmm, look, you have a weird spot on your face. I think it may be a basal cell carcinoma, but I mean, I see maybe four or five of these per year, whereas a dermatologist sees four or five per day, right? So it's not a matter of knowledge, it's a matter of experience and recognizing that basal cells have different types. They exist on a spectrum, they don't all look alike. And that example of basal cell carcinoma being a small red spot you can have on your skin, we can apply it to all signs and symptoms in medicine. Now, I can't expect to be a specialist in all rare diseases, and sometimes the only way of becoming knowledgeable or an expert in these rare diseases is to funnel them towards the same person. Now, I'm a family doctor by trade. In the morning, I see my clinic patients, I manage chronic diseases and even acute diseases and small emergencies. During the afternoon, I run a busy skin surgery clinic. I see red spots and big spots and lumps and bumps. But I don't pretend to be a dermatologist, I don't pretend to be a general surgeon, I don't pretend to be a plastic surgeon. I deeply understand that sometimes things don't present a specific typical way as we learn it in medical school, and honestly, they rarely do, and sometimes there are many different possibilities that could explain that red spot that appeared suddenly a few months ago. So I need specialists around me. So when managing diseases as a whole, I am all absolutely for specialization. But when it comes to managing chronic diseases and lifestyle-induced diseases, that's where specialization kind of meets its match. Now, precision medicine without context can actually distort understanding. No organ works alone, and much in the same way as no system acts independently. The heart doesn't only care about cholesterol, and the brain doesn't only care about brain neurotransmitters, much in the same way as the gut doesn't just care about digestion. Everything talks to everything else. Every organ communicates with every other organ. And this is where lifestyle medicines fit so naturally into the conversation. Now think about sleep for a moment. Poor sleep changes hunger hormones. Poor sleep changes the food choices you make the next day. People who have sleep deprivation, on average, eat up to 300 calories or more the next day, mainly from ultra-processed carbohydrate-rich foods. No, not sleeping well increases stress, it weakens your immune system, it alters insulin sensitivity, and it even impacts exercise recovery. Everything impacts everything else. And think about movement. Exercise also does the same thing. Changes the way your appetite is regulated, it changes the quality and quantity of sleep you get, it improves stress management, it makes you more resilient, changes your gut microbiome, and it changes hormones and insulin signaling and vascular health. None of these pillars operate alone. The way you eat impacts the way you sleep, and the way you sleep impacts the way you manage stress, and the way you manage stress affects the way you move, and the way you move impacts your metabolic health. Every choice you make that impacts one of these six pillars of lifestyle medicine, it ripples across the whole system. But yet, as our healthcare system becomes more specialized, I worry that we lose sight of this bigger picture that we zoom out. Now, we're very good at screening and testing and diagnosing and treating late-stage diseases, but we really struggle to actually address the upstream forces that are driving these diseases. Now, most of the leading causes of illness today are chronic conditions. Now, these are not rare things. They're heart disease, they're type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, high cholesterol, obesity, autoimmune conditions, and mental health disorders. Now, these aren't conditions that are caused by a single molecular broken pathway. They're conditions that are shaped over years and years by daily inputs. And these inputs are the foods that you put in your system, the amount of movement you put into the system, the sleep quality of that system, the amount of stress it's under, the amount of social connection you're exposed to, as well as other toxic substances like carcinogens, toxins, pollutants, smoking, alcohol. Now, your heart and your brain and your gut and your muscles and your immune systems, they're always in this constant conversation, responding to all of these inputs together every single day. So when we isolate organs that were never meant to function separately, we miss opportunities for prevention. We miss leverage points that could change a patient's trajectory before chronic diseases appear. This is why I believe our healthcare system must learn to zoom out as much as it is capable of zooming in. We absolutely need innovation and specialization, but we also need a little bit more zoomed-out perspective. Now, lifestyle medicine doesn't compete with advanced care or specialization. It supports it and it strengthens it. It addresses the foundational biology that determines whether disease develops in the first place. And that's why I am so proud of not only being a diplomat of the ABLM, the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, but also the new director of the Lifestyle Medicine Clinic and Residency Program that will be created at the medical clinic where I work and teach future doctors. Now, lifestyle medicine can be applied to all specialties. It doesn't just need to be to family medicine. And what we're seeing in the US happen is that we have over almost 300, over 270 residency programs that have integrated lifestyle medicine to it. Everything from internal medicine to psychiatry. Now when we focus on the whole system, we stop asking what pill fixes that and what procedure fixes this. And we start asking what patterns and lifestyle choices actually shaped this outcome. Now I'm trying to change the culture in which we practice medicine to have this culture of prevention sprinkled on every single medical specialty from family medicine to general surgery. Now shifting towards a culture of prevention could change everything. Now I know that just one person is not gonna change the system, but if we can change a patient, it's even better. And if we can change a doctor that changes the way he practices and sees hundreds of patients every single month over years, maybe that ripple effect will be bigger. So if there's one thing that I hope stays with you, is that the body is not a collection of independent parts. It's an integrated system that responds constantly to daily choices we make that touch all of these six lifestyle medicine pillars, from nutrition to sleep to movement to stress to social connections to toxins that we're exposed to daily. Now, modern medicine is excellent at zooming in, but health can also improve when we zoom out. Lifestyle factors are not plan B. They're the foundation of health, they influence every single organ or system and every long-term outcome. Now, everywhere globally, chronic diseases are the main causes of death. Cardiovascular disease is our top killer in the world with cancer coming in in second. 50% of cancers in women are breast and colon, and 50% of cancers in men are prostate and colon. These cancers are directly linked to lifestyle choices we make. Now there are absolutely bad lux and genetics involved. 100%, I agree. But we know, and we have studies showing that lifestyle choices from the amount of fiber you consume to the amount of alcohol you consume directly impacts the risk of all of these diseases. Now I want the system, the doctors, but also the patients to start thinking in systems instead of symptoms. And when something feels off, I want you to look beyond that single organ and to ask yourself what daily choices and daily patterns could possibly be contributing. I want my patients to protect their sleep as a priority instead of a luxury. Hustle culture and I'll sleep when I'm dead has probably caused more damage than good. Your sleep will shape your appetite, your stress, your immunity, your metabolic health. And I want my patients to move their bodies in a way that feels sustainable. Patients often ask me what's the best exercise? Is it jogging or swimming or rowing or elliptical? And I tell them the best exercise is the one that you can do sustainably over time and enjoy. Movement supports every single organ system simultaneously. And I want people to eat in a way that supports long-term physiology, in a way that's aligned with your biology. Eat whole foods, a variety of colorful plants, and being consistent matters much more than being perfect. I want my patients to manage their stress, to be proactive in including stress management strategies into their lives. I want them to establish boundaries and breathing techniques and spend time outdoors and connecting socially with other people. Stress signals are not in your head, they're biochemical, and these signals they touch every single organ of your body. I want people to remember that small daily choices compound. Health is rarely lost or gained in a single moment. It's the big picture that matters, it's the patterns over days and weeks and months and years that will determine health outcomes. You will not become unhealthy because you ate a piece of cake, much in the same way as you will not become healthy because you ate a piece of broccoli. The pattern over time is what will determine health outcomes. Right on. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks so much for listening. I hope this episode has helped you reflect on how our healthcare system as technology and knowledge grows. It seems like we've just kept on zooming in and we've lost sight of the bigger picture. Right on. Thanks for listening. We'll see you at the next episode. Peace. Hey everyone, go check out my website, plantbasedrjules.com, to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr.JulesCormier and on YouTube at PlantbaseDoctorJules.